For some reason, the sidewalks near main roads in Sandy have been deleted without much warning. I just have to question what is with these changes and who is responsible for removing the work of mine and others.

Hello,

I recently noticed that Someone, Which I do not know of, Has vandalised clyst vale by Removing the entire school, and replacing it with a sainsburys, ive wrote this to alert a mod to hopefully revert the changes at clyst vale

-SouthWestTrains1

This article was originally written in French here. This English version was partly translated with DeepL.com.

OpenArdenneMap is an open-source map style designed for the production of topographic maps for printing. Based on OpenStreetMap data, it is available for use with QGIS and the Mapnik/cartoCSS libraries. Here is the winter 2025–26 release.

I started working on OpenArdenneMap about nine years ago. My aim was to create a map style for producing high-quality topographic maps intended for printing, using mainly OpenStreetMap data. The main challenge is to automate map production, to limit ‘manual’ corrections as much as possible (without eliminating them entirely). Since then, the style has been used in several mapping projects: together with colleagues, I have set up a website for downloading hiking maps (hiking.osm.be) and have been able to test the deployment of a tile server on https://www.nobohan.be/webmaps/oam-tile/.

… See full entry

One of the most memorable phases of my OpenStreetMap journey was being part of the Autumn Mapping Sprint 2025, sponsored by Youth Innovation Lab. This was a funded mapping sprint that lasted for one full month, making it both exciting and challenging at the same time.

What made this experience even more intense was that, during the very same month, I was also involved in a one-month field campaign in Dolakha district as part of my studies. Managing both at the same time was not easy.

My days were filled with fieldwork—collecting data, traveling, and completing academic responsibilities. And yet, despite the physical exhaustion, I stayed committed to mapping. Every evening, I tried to make time—sometimes small, sometimes longer—to contribute to the sprint. It required discipline, time management, and a lot of determination.

There were moments when I felt overwhelmed, but I didn’t want to give up. Being part of a funded program and representing myself among advanced mappers motivated me to keep going. I reminded myself why I started this journey and how far I had already come.

Throughout the month, I continued mapping—adding buildings, improving roads, and refining data with care. Even with a busy schedule, I managed to stay consistent and complete my contributions.

Being recognized as one of the advanced mappers during this sprint made the experience even more meaningful. It wasn’t just about mapping anymore—it was about proving to myself that I could handle challenges and still stay committed to my goals.

Looking back, this month feels like a true test of my dedication. Balancing fieldwork and mapping taught me resilience, time management, and self-belief.

This experience showed me that no matter how busy life gets, with determination and passion, I can always find a way to keep going.

Looking back at my OpenStreetMap journey, two dates will always hold a very special place in my heart—June 21 and October 14.

On June 21, I achieved something I had been working toward for a long time: I became the top mapper in KU Youth Mappers. That moment felt surreal. From the days when I was just learning how to draw my first building on the map to reaching the top position—it was a journey filled with patience, consistency, and continuous learning. Every late night of mapping, every small correction, and every effort finally felt worth it.

But the journey didn’t stop there.

On October 14, I reached another incredible milestone—I became a top mapper in UN Mappers. This achievement felt even bigger, as it connected my work to a global level. Contributing alongside mappers from around the world and being recognized among them made me realize how far I had come.

These milestones are not just about rankings or titles. They represent growth, dedication, and the impact of consistent effort. From starting out as a beginner to becoming a leading contributor in both university and international communities, my journey has transformed me—not just as a mapper, but as a learner and contributor.

Sometimes I pause and think about how it all started with simple curiosity. And now, those small steps have led to achievements I once never imagined.

This journey reminds me that with passion and persistence, even the smallest edits can lead to the biggest milestones.

Before

After

… See full entry

A future version of the UrbanEye3D plugin will support trees and other objects.

(Picture: Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary, Zagreb)

Note: this version is still in development, but should be relesed by the end of this month

Hello people, I’ve been Hoping to help my local town of Exeter and nearby plymouth, ive so far made houses in both sherford and torpoint, ive also named the schools of Clyst vale and Stoke hill, And im hoping to do more to help the community of OpenStreetMap

-SouthWestTrains1

Westhay Moor & Honeygar Farm: osm.org/#map=16/51.19215/-2.78186

Shapwick Heath Nature Reserve & RSPB Ham Wall: osm.org/#map=15/51.15109/-2.79207

Hello

I have been using OpenStreetMaps for navigation across the globe for multiple years free of charge. I think the time has come for me to give something back to this community.

Thank you wonderful people at OpenStreetMap for such a wonderful project! I hope my contributions will help.

Kind regards

The Vilnius Stroller

I’ve been mapping crosswalk corners using a single point for the curb (lowered or otherwise) on a small spur connecting the sidewalk to the crossing way, trying to balance: - One entity per feature (not duplicating the curb) - Not blocking the sidewalk routing (on the sidewalk, you don’t need to cross the curb to turn the corner) - Not blocking the crossing routing (if you cross one edge, then the next edge, you don’t necessarily need to stop at the curb unless the intersection has signals)

When I update an intersection that has the two sidewalk ways and two crosswalk ways meeting at a single curb point, or sidewalks crossing and connecting two separate curb points to the crossings (except where there actually are two curbs), I’ve been reworking the ways to match this structure.

The latest Pedestrian Working Group/Guide suggests a slightly different approach (examples at that link):

• Use a single point for the kerb where it meets the road.
• Only use a second curb POI if there are two distinct curb features.
• Use a spur connecting the curb to the two branches of sidewalk.
• Allow the crossing ways to meet at the curb point.

It makes sense, and it’s cleaner than the way I’ve been trying to put the curb in the middle of that stub (and more accurate in that the kerb isn’t in the middle of the sidewalk), so going forward I’ll use that scheme instead.

Unfortunately I can’t just turn off the “Barrier blocking highway” rule in Osmose, because it’s still needed to find places where the sidewalks meet incorrectly at the curb. :shrug:

I am happy to annouce that, after a long time we, the OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers, have prepared a new major release of the OpenStreetMap Carto stylesheet (the default stylesheet on the OSM website). Once changes are deployed on openstreetmap.org it will take a couple of days before all tiles show the new rendering.

The main change that warrants a new major release is the move to the osm2pgsql flex backend. This now requires an osm2pgsql version >= 1.8.0. It, so far, only comes with very few and subtle changes in rendering results related to changes in defaults in polygon/linestring classification of closed ways. The database schema is explicitly meant to be backwards compatible from the style side so style users who render different styles from the same database should be able to continue to do so without problems. We hope to use the additional flexibility of osm2pgsql in the future, but we have decided to do this step by step - and with this release only make the formal move but not yet make larger changes to the database. Deployments none the less should do a full database reload.

What we have, however, in this release is an additional table with the commonly used values for shop and office tags. This is generated and filled with an sql script (common-values.sql) that is included in the style. This needs to be run on the database before using the style - like existing indexes.sql and functions.sql.

Here are some details on the visible changes this release brings to the style.

Stop shop/office catch-all

… See full entry

Android 13 was released in August 2022, not yesterday, but on the other hand not so long ago.

Why is this relevant?

With Android 14 google started updating the root certificates¹ with updates to its “play” services², prior to that they were only updated with full system updates and while now you can count on such updates for multiple years that used to be very different.

This is a problem for apps running on older devices that need to access resources on the Internet with encrypted connections (that is with https) as not only can such a resource change its certificate provider and potentially by doing that change the relevant certificate authority, certificates can expire or otherwise be invalidated. If that happens the resource is essentially unusable without an update to the certificate authorities.

This is not a new problem, particularly for Vespucci³ as we support devices going back to Android 5 and without the app bringing its own copy of the relevant root certificate for Let’s Encrypt⁴ along, you wouldn’t have been able to access openstreetmap.org for years on old phones.

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when on last Saturday an issue was opened complaining that the Polish governments geoportal was erroring⁵, but what issues users report is not always straight forward, and this was likely the first “important” source that ran in to the problem.

Now there is a quick fix and that is that the user installs the relevant certificates on their device themselves, this requires that the relevant app trusts user installed certificates and I’ve enabled that on V21.2.4 that is being distributed now. What the situation is with this configuration with other apps is unclear.

… See full entry

Civil Protection Areas proposal → VOTING PHASE

After 3+ weeks of silence following the RFC discussion (no further comments/objections), the proposal is now officially in Voting Phase!

📋 Wiki: osm.wiki/Proposal:Civil_Protection_Areas

🗳️ Vote until: March 23, 2026

🖼️ Live demo: https://andreadp271.github.io/civil_protection_areas_osm/

Key improvements from RFC feedback:

• Comparison tables vs assembly_point/disaster_help_point

• Clear shelter area distinctions (outdoor vs indoor)

• Refined rescue staging/logistics definitions

Please cast your {{vote

yes}}, {{vote

no}} or {{vote

abstain}} on the Wiki!

Rail trails with route relations with railway=abandoned to denote a rail trail is not working. When the named “bike route” enters city streets or along side walks where the railroad never went this becomes and tagging nightmare.

I have had to remove railway=abandoned from a route relation in British Columbia and in New Hampshire where these were both issues. osm.org/note/5066887#map=15/41.40203/-73.62096

osm.org/note/4680502#map=15/49.49511/-121.22581

Can we find a better tags to mark bike routes with rail trail?
this is specific to route relations and not current tags for infrastructure, railway=abandoned still works for infrastructure

I would propose something like railway=trail so we keep this straight. It looks like railtrail=yes is a tag.

Yours in Mapping Natfoot

this is related to my other project on routing and bike routes. ask if you want to know more.

This is not about the Linux Foundations Overture Maps attempt to hoodwink the Open Geospatial Consortium into standardising Overtures GERS (Global Entity Reference System) ¹. There is so little technical content available in that proposal that it is difficult to write even a short paragraph about it. But it is motivated by Overtures attempt to engage in the great American tradition of selling snake oil by suggesting that GERS solves real problems ². None of the following is new, and all this has been discussed many times in the OSM community.

It isn’t as if having a persistent id for an entity isn’t useful, for example if you are running a restaurant review site³ you definitely want a way to reference and track the state of the object you have reviews for in your geodata source, be it be based on OSM or some other data. The issue is simply:

your persistent id is not my persistent id.

Or perhaps better, your persistence is not my persistence. Lets illustrate that with the restaurant review example again: assume you’ve generated an id in some fashion and map that to an OSM object (more on that below), when do you consider the current restaurant different from the original, and when do you consider it different enough that you will want a new id?

Is it

• when the name changes?
• when the location changes? What about if it has just moved to the next block?
• when the cuisine changes?
• when the chef changes?
• when the owner changes?

And so on.

The answers to these questions depend on your use case and your business logic and a global one size fits all is very unlikely to be of any help at all. Now you might say, but there are objects, places, buildings and geographical entities that have less tendency to change, at least on a typical humans time scale and yes ids could be useful for these, but they are by their very nature easily referenced by their location⁴.

… See full entry

Today I received an invitation to attend the bi-monthly OSM US Maintainers Working Group.

But due to timezone difficulties, I don’t think I’ll be able to attend it live.

The meeting agenda has been shared, mainly focusing on the topic of standards and interoperability. There are some interesting starter questions there, so I’m intrigued to answer those questions in an OSM diary instead, hoping that I’ll be able to join the discussion asynchronously.

So, here we go :

---

“What standards (geospatial file or data formats, metadata schemas, wire protocols, structured text formats, encodings, etc.) does your project depend on or interact with?”

I frequently use GeoJSON format in several of my projects.

“Are there any standards that you wish would be evolved/extended but aren’t actively maintained? Or implementations that aren’t fully compliant that you wish would be?”

GeoJSON fits pretty much all of my required use cases. My only concern right now is how to make GeoJSON files more compact. I haven’t researched much about this since there’s currently no urgent performance issue that needs to be handled, but I love tweaking my apps for performance.

“Are there standard formats or protocols that you would like to use, but aren’t well supported in your language/ecosystem?”

The General Transit Feed Specification.

I’ve been interested in this data format for a long time, but I still don’t know how to properly tinker with it. Last time I worked on this, I had to make my own Python implementation to read and navigate GTFS files. I don’t know what the current situation is right now. Maybe it’s already supported, maybe not.

“What are your thoughts on Overture’s OGC proposal?”

I already posted my thoughts in a certain Slack thread somewhere. Here’s the verbatim quote:

“Does an OGC standard become legally binding worldwide or something?

… See full entry

Finished adding villages in Nagqu City with Tibetan names listed in the Place Names Database KNAB and having a Q-id in wikidata; I’m continuing with Ngari Prefecture.

Place names in Tibetan script are viewable using maps.wikimedia.org with lang parameter set to bo.

Tonight I finished mapping Maud, meaning the bulk of Fairview California is mapped. There are still some places along Fairview Avenue as it goes around in a circle and becomes Hayward but this is area shared by Hayward, Castro Valley and Fairview.

It feels so good to see my home there and recognizable.

I started this project in earnest on November 18th (although I did my own street back in June).

Proposal for Tagging Detector‑Operated Pedestrian Signals in OSM

Author: Derlamaer
Date: 18 February 2026

Introduction

I’m new to OSM and to cartography in general, so please excuse any imperfections in this post. As I’ve been mapping my surroundings, I noticed a gap in how we describe certain modern pedestrian crossings, and I would like to propose a way to fill it.

More and more signal‑controlled pedestrian crossings are equipped with automatic presence detectors. These sensors detect a pedestrian (or sometimes a vehicle) and trigger the traffic signal phase without requiring a push button. This behaviour is common in newer installations, but OSM’s tagging does not yet have a clear, standard way to capture it.

This diary entry describes the situation, proposes a tag, and invites feedback.

Current OSM Tagging for Signalised Crossings

Today, a typical signalised pedestrian crossing in OSM is tagged as:

highway=crossing
crossing=traffic_signals

To refine this, the OSM Wiki documents a couple of useful additional keys:

button_operated=yes/no Indicates whether a pedestrian must press a button to request the green signal.

traffic_signals:sound=yes/no Indicates the presence of an acoustic signal for visually impaired users. (See the wiki page for crossing=traffic_signals for details .)

However, there is no widely documented, standard key that says:

“This traffic signal is triggered automatically by a detector, with no need for a push‑button.”

That is the missing piece I am trying to address.

Real‑World Example (Toulouse, France)

One concrete example can be found in Toulouse, France, where several pedestrian crossings use overhead or roadside sensors (camera, infrared, radar or similar) to detect pedestrians as they approach the kerb.

A representative location is shown on Google Street View (link as used in the forum post). In such setups:

… See full entry